As the Internet and other online access to information continues to grow, users are increasingly presented with an over-abundance of available information content without effective means to manage it (e.g., to identify content that is relevant, accurate and enjoyable). One particular example of an increasing source of content relates to merchants who provide items (e.g., products, services, and/or information) via the World Wide Web (“the Web”) that customers can acquire, such as items available for purchase, rent, lease, license, trade, evaluation, sampling, subscription to, etc. It is common for such Web merchants and other online retailers to design their Web sites to display content in order to draw interest to items available from the Web site. As one example of such content, some Web merchants include item reviews on their Web sites, such as to provide additional information about an item.
While Web merchants may in some cases pay professional reviewers to prepare item reviews, procuring such reviews can be expensive, and some readers of professional reviews may be distrustful of the evaluation from a professional reviewer. Thus, volunteer users of a Web site, such as customers of a merchant's Web site, are often solicited to prepare item reviews, as well as to rate available items. Similarly, in many situations a Web merchant or other Web site operator may solicit or accept other types of content from volunteer users, such as images of items for sale (e.g., images of the items in use) or other types of images, or information of other types in other forms (e.g., audio information, video information, photos, textual information, etc.). However, while volunteer item reviews, item ratings and other user-supplied information may have advantages over professional reviews, ratings and other professionally-supplied information in terms of cost and of appeal to some readers, volunteer programs often have significant disadvantages of their own. For example, it can often be difficult to convince volunteers to prepare item reviews or to provide ratings or other information. In addition, many such volunteer reviews may be of little use to other users (e.g., prospective purchasers) for a variety of reasons, such as poor writing and/or analysis, the inclusion of irrelevant and/or inappropriate subject matter, opinions that differ greatly from those of most other users, etc.
Another significant problem with item reviews authored by volunteer reviewers, as well as with item ratings and a variety of other types of information provided by users, is that the information may be inaccurate, such as due to biases of the users who provide the information. For example, with respect to item reviews authored by volunteer reviewers, a reviewer affiliated with an item (e.g., an author of a book) may provide an overly laudatory review of the item, while other reviewers (e.g., authors of competing books) may provide overly critical reviews of the item. This problem can be mitigated when the actual identity of the user who provided the information is indicated to others, both by allowing others to hold a user who provides information accountable for that information, and by allowing others to discount information based on the identity of the user who provided the information if they so desire. However, many existing systems allow users to provide information anonymously or using a pseudonym, which does not allow other users to assess the credibility of such information. Moreover, even if such systems do display a name of the user who provided information, the systems do not typically provide any assurance that the displayed user's name is authentic, leaving such systems susceptible to users who attempt to surreptitiously influence others by disguising their actual identities.
In view of the above-discussed problems, it would be beneficial to enhance reliability and credibility of information by identifying potentially fraudulent, biased, unhelpful or un-useful information.